It has been more than once remarked, that there is an intangible bond of kinship betwixt the highest and the humblest elements of the community. Whilst the bourgeois complacently busy themselves with their commonplace, respectable, and unimaginative careers of money-grabbing, the artist and the aristocrat join forces with the ploughman and the peasant in an involuntary mental wave of reaction against the monotony of materialism.

Never has this kinship been more plainly exhibited than in the present movement among a certain class of American professional authors to band themselves together in an honest workingman’s union, and to affiliate with that peerless palladium of industrial independence—the well-known and far famed American Federation of Labour. That the professions of the average modern author and the day-labourer are remarkably alike in intellectual requirements, The Conservative has long been convinced. Both types shew a certain rough vigour of technique which contrasts very strikingly with the polish of more formal times, and both seem equally pervaded with that spirit of progress and enlightenment which manifests itself in destructiveness. The modern author destroys the English language, whilst the modern strike-loving labourer destroys public and private property.

Nor can the ambitious author afford to despise the prodigious power to be gained by entrance into the ranks of organised labour. Since our obliging executive Mr. Wilson has established the precedent of national surrender at the least crook of Labour’s gnarled finger, it may be justly assumed that the Writers’ Brotherhood, as the most voluble and volatile of all the various bodies of workmen, will have complete power over all departments of the government; at least, until March 4, 1917. From this immeasurable height, our professional scribblers may brandish the quill of authority over a submissive Congress, and extort by due process of law every conceivable sort of advantage over the publishing fraternity, as well as over their less enterprising fellows—the non-union writers. It is barely possible that a strike of authors might be slightly less effective as a threat, than a strike of railway men; but so fond is our present idealistic executive of the beauties of rhetoric, that he would without doubt do much for the cause of fine words.

The place of literary radicals and imagist “poets” in this Utopian scheme demands grave consideration. Since the trade union movement requires at least an elementary amount of intelligence in its adherents, and is applied mainly to SKILLED labour, these deserving iconoclasts of the Amy Lowell school would seem to be left, Othello-like, without an occupation. But a moment’s reflection serves to dissolve the difficulty. Here, indeed, is ideal material for that vague and awe-inspiring industrial “Mano Nera” known as the “I. W. W.”! The benefits of such a coalition of “vers-libristes” and anarchists are patent to all. Since, save for its law and window breaking, the I. W. W. is in a condition of perpetual idleness, its leaders being generally out on strike, or out on bail; its imagistical recruits would naturally be constrained to follow the general example, inaugurating amongst themselves a sympathetic “walkout”, and thereby delivering the public ear and the editorial waste basket from the annoyance of their effusions.

It is quite probable that the Brotherhood of Simplified Spellers would have to be created separately from both the American Federation of Labour and the I. W. W. Certain members of these learned societies, including expert hod-carriers and pick and shovel engineers, find difficulty enough with our language as now written, and could not possibly tolerate the presence of those reformers who are adding variability to its other faults.

The burning question of contemporary literature apparently concerns the eight-hour day for historians and the minimum wage for sonneteers. These things, and countless others which fret the artistic brain, could easily be solved by unionism. For instance; shall poets be paid by the hour or by the line? The one system discriminates unjustly against such careful workmen as Tom Gray, who consumed seven years on a job only 128 lines long, called “An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; whilst the other system is too partial to speedy labourers like Sam T. Coleridge and Bob Southey, who, working together, built the poetic drama of “The Fall of Robespierre” between seven o’clock of an evening and the next noon. Also, pay by the line is unfair to writers of Alexandrines like Mike Drayton,6 while it unduly favours tetrameter bards like Sam Butler and Walt Scott, and leaves a bitter dispute to be settled amongst the ballad-mongers; who sometimes reckon their verses by long lines of fourteen syllables each, and at other times double the number of lines, the long heptameters being split up into alternate lines of eight and six syllables, respectively.

Amateur journalism, because of its free avenues of expression, would doubtless be suppressed as a hotbed of “scabs” by the Gomperses and Giovanittis of organised literature. Since it is the prevailing notion of trade unionism that no man has the right to labour without supporting a union and assuming the insignia of industrial blackmail, it may easily be deduced that literary unionism would utterly forbid all thought or expression by outsiders; and that it would, if necessary, resort to violence in cases of stubborn authorship by United members. Whether this violence would consist of stoning or of satire, is as yet uncertain.

A rather perplexing aspect of the case is afforded by the classic authors. These writers, having lived before the dawn of the New Slavery, are all necessarily non-union, wherefore a man who reads their work must logically be boycotted or placed upon the “unfair list” by the modern Knights of Grub-Street. The manner of establishing such a boycott would be interesting to determine; but the action will probably never be necessary, since but few up-to-date persons ever touch or peruse classic literature.

Looking ahead, as is the custom of all good radicals, the student may discern an age in which the whole domain of art—literary, pictorial, sculptural, architectural, and musical—will be placed upon a strictly union basis. Indeed, the modern Huns are already proving their efficient progressiveness by destroying the offensively beautiful non-union architecture of mediaeval religion in Belgium and northern France. “Down with the cathedrals, Comrade von Teufel,” cries Bill Hohenzollern, head of the Berlin Butchers’ Local No. 1914, “for they bear not the union label!”

Concerning trade unionism among authors as a whole, The Conservative will not venture here to render an opinion. Be it sufficient for him to say, that it would at least interest him to behold a new folly in a field whose potentialities of fatuity he had thought already exhausted.